What’s next for the author whose modern take on ninja became a hit series the world over? 

Weekly Shonen Jump Editor-in-Chief Hiroyuki Nakano announced at a Tokyo press conference on March 5 that plans for Masashi Kishimoto’s new story are indeed progressing, with more details to be released in the new future. The series has been confirmed to be a long-term serialization as opposed to a short one-shot.

▼ 43-year-old Masashi Kishimoto

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The author of Naruto has been more-or-less taking a well-deserved break since his most famous work about a young ninja who dreamed of becoming Hokage came to an end in 2014. Naruto was eventually collected into a total of 72 volumes.

Since then, Kishimoto has penned a short spin-off manga called Naruto: The Seventh Hokage and the Scarlet Spring. While a sequel to Naruto, titled Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, has been serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump since 2016, it’s no secret that Kishimoto is only minimally involved with supervision of the story. The sequel is instead written by Ukyo Kodachi, Kishimoto’s co-writer for Boruto: Naruto the Movie, and illustrated by Mikio Ikemoto, one of Kishimoto’s assistants during the Naruto manga’s original run.

Online fans met the news with excitement and a bit of trepidation, drawing some parallels to other famous authors of hit manga:

“So he’s still gonna work, huh? He’s not gonna pull a Toriyama [Akira Toriyama, author of Dragon Ball] on us?”

“I’d still be fine if he only published some short works like Toriyama.”

“Just as long as he doesn’t become another Togashi [Yoshihiro Togashi, author of YuYu Hakusho and Hunter x Hunter who’s drawn the ire of fans for taking extended breaks].”

“I think he published a story about baseball and detectives (?) during Naruto’s run, but they were both so-so. Making two hit long-shots is gonna be tough.” [Author’s note: actually, they were stories about baseball and the mafia.]

“I want him to do something super realistic this time.”

In fact, Kishimoto had already revealed back in 2015 that the genre of his next long serialization will be science fiction. While we’re going to miss all of the cool ninja techniques, we’re just as thrilled to see Kishimoto’s take on a completely different kind of story.

Source: Mainichi Shinbun
Featured image: SoraNews24/Jesse Rogers